Last year, the start menu on my Windows 10 user account stopped working. When
I'd press the Windows button, nothing would happen. There were also issue with
a few buttons on the taskbar. Some of them didn't have an icon and when you
pressed them, they did nothing. After much searching and frustration, I found
out that the TileDataLayer directory under my account may have been corrupted.
Unfortunately, I didn't find any tool to fix that or even determine with some
certainty that this was the issue. However at this point, I didn't have much
to lose, so I went ahead and reset it manually.

In the first several months of 2015, I have had a problem with gophers digging up my backyard. I tried many ways of getting rid of them, however only one way actually worked. Let's talk about those ways.

A coworker of mine asked me how to pick a credit union. He was fed up with his current bank (for reasons he never explained to me) and he knew that I had been a board member of North County Credit Union. So he asked me what he should look for when picking a credit union. I told him several things he should look for.

So first of all, I switched this blog and in fact my whole website from wordpress to nikola. The nikola website explains what it is so I won't go into that here. However I will explain the reasons for the switch. I will also explain how I get the latest version of nikola on my ubuntu system.

My favorite editor on devices where I have a real keyboard is called vim. I use it when writing just about any text document or source code file because it has commands where you can do most things with a few keystrokes. For example, if I want to properly indent my whole source file I just type ggVG=. You wouldn't think that would come up often, but when you work with many developers you use commands like that a lot. Anyway, I have created quite a few support files for my personal vim environment. Just recently, I put them into a mercurial repository and put that repository up on bitbucket. This post explains how to clone the repository and to set it up for your own use. The steps below assume that you have vim and mercurial installed and they are setup in the PATH. The optional steps below assume that you also have git and curl installed and they are setup in the PATH.

With the announcement that OneNote is now (even more) free, I thought I'd write a post about how I use Microsoft OneNote. Wikipedia says, "Microsoft OneNote is a computer program for free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration." That is exactly what I use it for. To type up and share information with my family.

Back in late 2013, my group at work was moved to a new location in another building. This new location has more space so we could all be in one place. Unfortunately, with us all being together in one place, the amount of interruption that happens now is at an all time high. Each one of these interruptions by themselves isn't a big deal, but when you take them all together, it ends up being a lot of lost productivity. Here is how I deal with each type of interruption.

Welcome to my world! Even though, I've held on to this vanity domain for almost 15 years without doing anything special with it, I've actually published blogs in several different places such as wordpress.com and tumblr.com. The great thing about publishing in those places are that you don't have to worry about managing a domain or updating software. The bad thing is you have to deal with their terms of service. I've seen blogs just disappear (without a trace) before. So, I've finally decided that it was time to have my own name and my own voice on the internet. This blog will be about issues that I've had and how I solved the issue.